1942’s Casablanca is one of the most famous and beloved films of all time and it is certainly the only reason us common folk know anything about the town, especially its atmosphere and how it was administered during World War II. Robert Zemeckis’s Allied is set in the exact same time and place. If the story was not so epic and serious, I would half expect Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard to waltz into Rick’s Café. Imagine if Rick and Ilsa were super secret spies, fell in love while executing an assassination, and ran away to London to get married and ride out of the rest of the war. To be sure, a different plot than the Michael Curtiz film, but as stories and settings go, these two films are close cousins.

Where Casablanca is more dramatic romance set in a wartime backdrop, Allied is an espionage thriller laced with action and a more visually-enhanced passionate romance. Considering Brad Pitt is involved, there is also a slight whiff of Mr. and Mrs. Smith woven into the fabric. There are so many secrets between Pitt and Cotillard, the requisite implicit trust for a marriage foundation is wobbly at best. Allegedly based on the true story of a pair of World War II spies who fell in love only to become suspicious of one another again, screenwriter Steven Knight creates an exotic setting to foment romantic feelings before whisking the pair back to wartime reality amidst the London Blitz.

Knight is no stranger to London dramas, he earned an Oscar nomination for Dirty Pretty Things (2002), wrote Eastern Promises (2007), and wrote and directed the intense one man show Locke (2013). As if World War II spies and counter-espionage were not already dramatic enough, Knight throws in a twist which bubbles over the melodrama a bit too much in this action/mystery stew. He incorporates the “Intimate Betrayal Rule” whereby should two agents marry and one discovers the other is a double agent, he or she must execute their partner straight away, lest they both hang for high treason. Even mentioning the alleged existence of such a rule in the script ensures the threat of it will pop up again.

The first half of our couple in question is French-Canadian pilot and behind-the-lines operative, Max Vatan (Pitt, The Big Short). His romantic foil is Marianne Beauséjour (Cotillard, Macbeth), a French Resistance undercover operative who poses as Max’s wife in Casablanca as they plan to assassinate the German Ambassador during a lavish party. The two spies break all the rules in the book, even as they liberally quote from it, as they embark upon a tragic love story set to machine guns and Nazis. They cement their frowned-upon romanticism in a car in the middle of the Moroccan desert during an impromptu cataclysmic sandstorm, a bit heavy-handed, even for director Robert Zemeckis.

Zemeckis is famous for directing the Back to the Future trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Cast Away, and won an Oscar for directing Forrest Gump. This man knows dramatic epics. But where Gump was nostalgic and Cast Away was man vs. nature, Allied is a throwback to Golden Age filmmaking. Back in the ‘40s, Hollywood churned out gargantuan suspenseful dramas on an assembly line. We don’t see these come around often nowadays as the summer blockbuster supplanted their role in the studios. Allied is a period romance and it is supposed to come with a particular amount of depth and power given the names Zemeckis, Pitt, and Cotillard attached to it.

However, the depth and power of the leads’ love affair does not jump out from the screen as Zemeckis assumes it does. I did not feel the gravity I expected to from such heavy hitters in such grave circumstances. Once away from Casablanca and settling into a wartime London routine, Max’s intelligence superiors accuse Marianne of being a spy, of stealing all the secrets she can from his covert efforts and transmitting them to Nazi Germany. Max has no choice but to play along with an operation to test Marianne but he goes on the offensive. London may not trust Marianne, but he knows her. They have a child together for goodness sakes.

By the timeline, D-Day is not far away and Max can already glimpse a peaceful life back home in Canada with his wife and child. His attempts to ferret out information and clear Marianne’s name spurs the film’s second half action after the post-Casablanca lull. Director of Photography, Don Burgess (The Conjuring 2), who has worked with Zemeckis on many of his films, gets playful with the camera exploiting mirrors in restaurants to keep us off balance during the Casablanca escapade and sets up scenes we think are outside before pulling back to reveal a windshield and an interior car situation. It is exciting to see Casablanca filmed again, especially with 21st-century technology, and to compare and contrast its elegance and exoticness with London’s drab-gray destruction. Perhaps more effort focused on Max and Marianne at the expense of visual effects and ‘wow factor’ sets would achieve the dramatic depth Allied desperately requires to work. As it is, Allied is a standard to above-average World War II thriller with all the powerful names in the world behind it, just not the most powerful script. ​